Technology networks for socially useful production

No description supplie

Multi-Level governance: Towards an analysis of renewable energy governance in the English regions

governance, renewable energy

Policy additionality for UK emissions trading projects: a report for the Department of Trade & Industry

No description supplie

Constructing grassroots innovations for sustainability

One of the cleavages within sustainable development is division between grassroots environmental action, often deemed good on participation terms, and green innovation, usually centred on technologies in firms and deemed good for ecological modernisation. This special section is dedicated to an obvious and missing connection: grassroots innovation for sustainability. Grassroots innovations typically involve networks of activists and organisations generating novel bottom-up solutions for sustainable development; solutions that respond to the local situation and the interests and values of the communities involved (Seyfang and Smith, 2007). What they share is commitment on the part of those involved towards openness and inclusion in the processes of innovation and the outputs of innovation. Research is still needed that considers whether and how grassroots innovators network with one another; the extent to which movements for grassroots innovation approaches exist and how they operate; whether and how innovations diffuse through processes of replication, scaling-up, and translation into institutions; and whether or not these developments constitute alternative pathways for sustainability. The empirical contributions in this special section consider the dilemmas of going to scale, the challenges of moving from innovation to institutionalisation, and the risks of capture and instrumentality when grassroots innovations encounter more powerful political economies of conventional innovation systems (see also Smith et al., 2013). A recurring theme is diversity in innovation for sustainability; which might be served best by resisting pressures to mainstream, yet simultaneously generates accusations of marginality. In highlighting these themes and introducing the special section, we use a particular example, the Brighton Earthship, and which all contributing authors visited as part of a research workshop on grassroots innovation held at Sussex University in May 2012 and that led to the papers here

Intuition and concrete particularity in Kant's transcendental aesthetic

By transcendental aesthetic, Kant means “the science of all principles of a priori sensibility” (A 21/B 35). These, he argues, are the laws that properly direct our judgments of taste (B 35 – 36 fn.), i.e. our aesthetic judgments as we ordinarily understand that notion in the context of contemporary art. Thus the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled the Transcendental Aesthetic, enumerates the necessary presuppositions of, among other things, our ability to make empirical judgments about particular works of art. These presuppositions are sensible rather than intellectual because on Kant’s view, all intellection that considers objects of any kind, whether abstract or concrete, must at base connect to actual, material objects with which we come into direct contact; and this we can do only through sensibility (A 19/B 33). Thus the following discussion explores what Kant claims must be true of us in order to make the sorts of aesthetic judgments we make, rather than any particular class or quality of aesthetic judgments itself. On Kant’s view, what must be true of us in order to make aesthetic judgments is not different from what must be true of us in order to make any other kind of judgment about empirical objects

Intellectual Property Education – Thinking outside the Box meets Colouring within the Lines

A basic understanding of intellectual property (IP) is essential for practice as a professional engineer and/or designer to ensure commercial success. Engaging students in a ‘real-life’ scenario or problem is one of the most effective methods of doing this. As they must first understand the problem, then seek knowledge to solve the problem, which ensures they develop their skills along the way. This paper concerns how intellectual property rights education is addressed in the HIGHER education of both lawyers and designers/engineers. It is written jointly, from the perspective of both design/engineering and law education and focuses on the pedagogical issues that are different or shared

The transitions discourse in the ecological modernisation of the Netherlands

Discourse analysis, socio-technical transitions, ecological modernisation

A text-mining system for extracting metabolic reactions from full-text articles

Background: Increasingly biological text mining research is focusing on the extraction of complex relationships relevant to the construction and curation of biological networks and pathways. However, one important category of pathway—metabolic pathways—has been largely neglected. Here we present a relatively simple method for extracting metabolic reaction information from free text that scores different permutations of assigned entities (enzymes and metabolites) within a given sentence based on the presence and location of stemmed keywords. This method extends an approach that has proved effective in the context of the extraction of protein–protein interactions. Results: When evaluated on a set of manually-curated metabolic pathways using standard performance criteria, our method performs surprisingly well. Precision and recall rates are comparable to those previously achieved for the well-known protein-protein interaction extraction task. Conclusions: We conclude that automated metabolic pathway construction is more tractable than has often been assumed, and that (as in the case of protein–protein interaction extraction) relatively simple text-mining approaches can prove surprisingly effective. It is hoped that these results will provide an impetus to further research and act as a useful benchmark for judging the performance of more sophisticated methods that are yet to be developed

Community innovation for sustainable energy

As in other countries, there is a growing public, policy and business interest in the UK in the roles and potential of community-led initiatives for sustainable energy consumption and production. Such initiatives include green lifestyle-based activities to reduce energy consumption (e.g. Transition Towns, and Carbon Reduction Action Groups), more traditional behaviour change initiatives such as neighbourhood insulation projects and energy-saving campaigns, as well as renewable energy generation projects such as community-owned windfarms and biofuel projects. Case studies of specific projects identify a variety of rationales amongst participants, whilst policy interest suggests a more instrumental concern for facilitating additional, larger-scale sustainable energy transitions. Amongst participant rationales are ideas that bottom-up, community-based projects deliver energy savings and behaviour changes that top-down policy instruments cannot achieve, due to the greater local knowledge and engagement they embody, the sense of common ownership and empowerment, and the social capital and trust that is generated among local actors. These resources provide organisational and values-based 'grassroots innovations' which experiment with new consumption practices based on alternative 'new economics' values. However, previous research shows 'grassroots innovations' face a series of critical challenges requiring support to overcome, in order to achieve their potential benefits more widely. This includes developing 'niche' networks for mobilising reforms both to highly centralised energy institutions and infrastructures, as well as deeply ingrained social practices of 'normal' energy consumption and everyday life. What makes this experience fascinating for the purposes of the SCORAI workshop is the way these community-based initiatives are trying to develop new energy-related consumption practices with a view to the socio-technical transition to local, renewable or lower carbon energy systems. Understandably, many projects remain practically focused on securing early successes and resourcing their long-term survival. However, the institutional and infrastructure reforms that will help in this endeavour require strategies for addressing the wider (national and international) political economy of consumption which adopts an ecological modernisation approach to sustainability. In surveying the community energy scene in the UK, our paper pays particular attention to this last issue

What is protective space? Reconsidering niches in transitions to sustainability

The transitions literature emphasises the role of niches, defined as a protective space for path-breaking innovations. Surprisingly, the concept of protection has not been systematically interrogated. Our analysis identifies protection as having three functions in wider transition processes: shielding, nurturing and empowerment. Empowerment, understood as processes and mechanisms that contribute to changes in mainstream selection environments in ways favourable to the path-breaking innovation, is considered the least developed in current niche development literature. We argue that these properties need to be understood from an agency perspective, with attention for the politics involved in their realisation. The paper ends with an outlook upon two promising research avenues: 1) the reconstruction of niche development pathways in light of the present framework; 2) analyses of the diverse (political) narratives seeking to empower niches across time and space.transitions, sustainability, niches